Running

What would lie beyond the valley? Yu Sheng felt this was a perfectly natural curiosity—that rolling mountain range stood quietly in his line of sight, looking not so towering that it couldn't be climbed, and the sky no longer hid anything terrible. Anyone standing here ought to wonder what sort of scenery lay on the other side of those mountains. "Have you ever tried to climb over that mountain before?" Yu Sheng asked Hu Li curiously. "I... tried a long time ago, when the immortal was still around," Hu Li nodded quickly. "Back then, a few of the grown-ups and I tried to cross it together, but we couldn't make it to the summit—when we climbed halfway up, a terrible sound would come from the sky. The higher we went, the more our strength drained away, and we started seeing horrifying miasma shadows before our eyes. The immortal even tried turning stone into puppets, sending the stone puppets up to climb for us, but halfway up, the link was cut off. The next day, the shattered pieces of the stone puppets tumbled down from the mountain, and every stone was bleeding. The grown-ups who went to check on them came back and said flesh and bone had already begun growing inside the stones." "A sound from the sky... sounds like the lingering influence of that 'Murky Angel' that covered the sky before," Irene muttered. "But I can't tell whether it was deliberate on that thing's part or just a 'passive effect.' After all, with something that sinister, sometimes simply 'existing' is enough to have a huge impact." "The Murky Angel's gone now, so we can go try again," Yu Sheng looked at Irene and Hu Li questioningly. "What do you think?" Hu Li nodded at once: "I'll do whatever my benefactor says." Irene waved a hand. "I don't care either way. You always have some scheme or another—you'll try anything, no matter how bizarre. I'm used to it." "All right, then it's a unanimous vote. Let's go." "How do we get over there? Open a door?" Irene glanced at Yu Sheng. "We have to walk," Yu Sheng said, waving a hand. "We've never been there, so opening a door straight there would make it hard to pin down the spot. And if that place really is the edge of a foreign domain, the environment might be very unusual—opening a door directly is too risky. If we walk over slowly, then even if the environment changes along the way, we won't be caught off guard with no time to react." At that, Irene's face lit up with astonishment. "You actually have a concept of 'playing it safe'?!" Yu Sheng: "I could drop you right now! You sit on my shoulder and still talk this much nonsense!" Hu Li watched the two of them bicker again, thought for a moment, then spoke up quietly. "Um... the valley's hard to cross, and you don't know an easy path up the mountain. Let me carry you?" Yu Sheng looked curious. "Carry us? Carry us how?" Then he saw the fox girl turn and run a few steps, and drop flat onto the ground—and amid a surge of wind pressure and illusory light, her form suddenly dissolved and shifted within the glow. Before he could even make out what was happening, a giant silver-white fox spirit appeared before Yu Sheng and Irene. Yu Sheng had seen Hu Li take her fox form before, but this was the first time Irene had witnessed it. The little doll's eyes went wide with shock, and after a loud "Waaah," she cried out: "Goodness! It's even bigger than two minivans!" "Is that any way to describe her?" Yu Sheng couldn't help shooting a glance at the doll on his shoulder, but he nodded along anyway. "It really is bigger than a minivan... just that whole bunch of tails is bigger than the car." As they spoke, the giant silver-white fox spirit had already padded over with light, graceful steps. She gently touched his head with her chin, nuzzling him affectionately. "Like this, I can carry several people at once!" For a moment, Yu Sheng said nothing. Because those two "gentle, affectionate" nudges from the great fox spirit had knocked the stars right out of his eyes—his head had nearly been driven back into his chest. "If you want to talk, just talk—could you rein in your strength a little?!" Yu Sheng barely kept himself from blacking out as he reached up and grabbed the fur on the fox's chin to stop her from nuzzling again. "Good grief, banging on top of my head like that..." Even as he spoke, his skull was still ringing—the shock of having the crown of his head cracked open by the fox immortal lingered and lingered. Hu Li might have been hopeless at anything else, but when it came to apologizing, she was genuinely fast; her head dipped down in an instant. "I'm sorry, benefactor..." Yu Sheng hurriedly sprang half a meter to the side, barely dodging having his skull cracked open by the girl's nose as she lowered her head. Only then did he get a chance to properly size up what the fox spirit girl looked like now. He had to admit, she truly was graceful, truly was beautiful. For the first time, he could find the words "a beauty to captivate a nation" in a creature that was, from head to toe, a furry canine—and yet, set against that "beauty," what he felt more of at this moment was the fox spirit's singular "presence." The giant silver-white fox spirit stood upon the earth, her golden-red eyes seeming to brim with a pool of flowing light. Several long tails swayed slowly behind her, and now and then tiny wisps of foxfire drifted up into the air, fluttering and scattering around her tails like sprites endowed with lives of their own. And probably because she'd been eating well these past couple of days and had taken a good bath earlier, her tails looked glossy and sleek now—in far better shape than when they'd first met. Hu Li lowered herself, one tail settling gently at her side, its tip coming to rest before Yu Sheng. "You can come up now," she said happily. "This really is a first..." Yu Sheng hesitated, then finally tested a foot on it. (In fact, because the fox spirit's fur looked so lovely just then, he even considered whether he ought to take his shoes off.) "It doesn't hurt you to step on you like this, does it?" "I can hardly feel it—just a little ticklish," Hu Li turned her head, watching Yu Sheng climb somewhat clumsily up her tail onto her back, and added a warning. "You can grab the fur beside you, otherwise your feet will slip." "It's fine, my footing's not bad," Yu Sheng, carrying Irene, laboriously climbed up onto Hu Li, then carefully picked a spot that looked relatively steady and sat down cross-legged. "I'm seated tight." Fluffy, and very warm. With a strange, subtle feeling, Yu Sheng reached out and stroked the fur around him, feeling as though he were sitting atop an especially fine, plush blanket. And before he could so much as marvel at it, he saw several tails curl over from behind Hu Li, screening him in at his side. Irene reached out and poked Yu Sheng's head. "There's even an armrest and a backrest!" Then she blurted out: "Could you get a seat installed on your shoulder too? A hard seat's fine..." Yu Sheng: "...What do you think?" "If it's a no, it's a no." A slight rocking came from beneath them, and the giant silver-white fox spirit slowly rose, turning toward that range of rolling high mountains in the distance. "We're setting off," for some reason, Hu Li's voice sounded especially cheerful. "Benefactor, hold on tight! We're going to run!" "I've got—" Yu Sheng had just managed a few words when he felt a jolt beneath him, and the next instant he nearly lost his seat—the fox spirit had already shot off like an untethered—whatever it was. A tail curled over from behind just in time to prop up Yu Sheng and Irene as they nearly lost their balance, and another extended from the side to block the fierce wind rushing at their faces. Amid the intense pressure shoving at his back, all Yu Sheng could see was the scenery on either side instantly dissolving into a string of receding blurs, and neither the gullies nor the ruins on the ground did the slightest thing to slow Hu Li's relentless acceleration. The fox spirit ran to her heart's content across the vast valley. "Waaah hahaha—!" Irene whooped and hollered, gripping Yu Sheng's head hard with one hand while facing the gale that blew in through the gaps in the tails—even though that wind had already been blunted countless times over—and opening her mouth as wide as she could. "We're—go—ing—to—fly—!" "I love running!" Hu Li's voice came from up front, brimming with delight. "It's been so long since I've run like this!" With one hand Yu Sheng clutched a big fluffy tail at his side; with the other he braced the little doll on his shoulder to keep the now-wildly-excited thing from being flung off: "Watch it! Don't crash—the mountain! The mountain! There's a mountain ahead!" "Okay!" Hu Li let out a joyful shout and, toward the slope now steadily drawing near, poured on another burst of speed—clusters of brilliant foxfire even blazed fiercely to life behind her. The flames gathered into tufts along her fox tails, and then a rapid series of dense booms rang out, forming pointed, cone-shaped trails amid the violent burning and eruption! Hearing the commotion, Yu Sheng hurriedly looked back and stole a glance through the gap in the fox tails, then instantly yelped: "Damn—rocket-boosted fox!" Then he felt an even fiercer pressure shove at his back, along with a violent shudder; even with his current physique, he nearly couldn't drag in a breath. The next moment, he realized Hu Li had already charged up onto the slope. She hadn't run up it. She had simply flown up—skimming the ground in ultra-low flight along the contours of the land! Almost in the blink of an eye, the rocket-boosted fox surged to a spot near the mid-slope, and her voice pierced through the howling wind into the ears of Yu Sheng and Irene: "Back then, this was where we started hearing the strange sounds, and any higher, we'd lose our strength and see strange things—we're about to cross over it!" And then, all but unimpeded, Hu Li charged across that "mid-slope line"—the line that, in her memory, had once stopped the immortal, stopped her mom and dad, stopped every last survivor. Nothing could bar her way here anymore. She could faintly make out the scenery of the summit, could see those jagged boulders standing atop the crest like rows of strange sentinels, arrayed beneath the light of the sky. She began to slow, the booster flames along her fox tails rapidly dying away, her nimble four feet coming down among the mountain rocks, steadying her body as she ran. Over the final few hundred meters nearing the summit, Hu Li's speed finally dropped to something like a brisk jog, and she leaped a few more times between the rocks before at last pulling to a stop in a relatively open patch of ground. The several tails on her back slowly unfolded, opening like a passenger cabin, revealing a rather dazed Yu Sheng within. It took him several seconds to come back to his senses, and he somewhat sluggishly raised his head to gaze into the distance. "Benefactor," Hu Li's voice reached his ears, "outside... it's still mountains. Mountains that just keep repeating."